


L'Origine du monde

by coffeeandoranges



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gratuitous French, Resolved Sexual Tension, with a side of Eating The Rich
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:07:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21795832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: “If I tried to leave,” Eve asks, “would you shoot me again?”“No,” Villanelle says, looking down in a way that makes the shadows on her face stand out. It’s a nice piece of work, this show of guilt. Eve doesn’t believe it for a second but feels touched Villanelle even bothered to try.And the Oscar goes to.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 30
Kudos: 207





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Basically what it says on the tin: this is a ficlet that grew into a season three speculative fic. Parts of it have already been disproven by cast/crew interviews about season three, though, so an AU tag will be in order soon. The title is from an (nsfw) Gustave Courbet painting. This is a four-parter, with the first two parts written and the third underway and a hell of an extensive outline for the fourth. I love this pairing and got tired of sitting on this fic, so— happy holigays. 
> 
> (This chapter is angsty, with a content warning for alcohol abuse. Things will lighten up as we get further along.)

She wakes up in the back of a car underground, as they’re going through a tunnel. The tunnel goes on for a while; Eve marks time by counting the yellow lights on the tunnel walls that flare every ten or so yards like a heartbeat. Beneath her there’s something wet. She touches her abdomen and her fingers come away bloody. _Oh shit. Oh shit._ Her first thought is for the upholstery. She’s going to leave a stain. 

Eve lets out a strangled cry. 

“Oh good, you’re awake.” 

Villanelle’s face appears between the car seats. 

She’s beautiful, in that red jumpsuit that billows and folds extravagantly, like a ballgown, her earrings glittering in the dark. 

“You shot me.”

Eve’s voice sounds, to her own ears, curiously calm. She doesn’t feel any pain. 

“Don’t move too much,” Villanelle advises her, and turns back to face the road. 

Eve sees the light at the end of the tunnel coming towards them both but it never reaches Eve. She slumps over and sinks back into unconsciousness. 

  
  


Eve dropped out of med school. 

Even then, she’d never minded the dead bodies. She almost liked them, the silent company they kept. Though not as much as she liked thinking about what made them dead– bullets, car wrecks, any of the other ways humans ended human life. Eve knows that the bullet left the tip of Villanelle’s gun and arched towards her body, landing in her abdominal cavity. The bullet could have hit any number of tender organs depending on where it entered. Lower, and it would have struck the small intestines, the colon. Higher up and it would be the stomach, the spleen, the liver. 

  
  


She has a number of absurd thoughts: an image of the mail stacked on the kitchen counter, advertisements from the window store where she’d bought the windows she’d bought because her life was unraveling. She’d stuck Niko with the bill. She can imagine his tender face, full of forgiveness. 

“I split a man’s head with an axe,” she imagines saying. 

The sun sets to her left— they’re moving north. 

Eve has lived her life on two different continents, moved across oceans; this isn’t the first border she’s crossed into the threshold of something else. 

She doesn’t know where Villanelle is driving them at first. Police lights strobe across the ceiling of the sedan and she holds her breath. The two-tone siren gets louder, and louder, and then it shuts off. 

Men pick her up and pull her out of the car. 

  
  


They’re not rough, but they aren’t gentle either, particularly when Eve starts to struggle. Villanelle’s face swims into view as Eve is strapped down to something flat and heavy. 

“Stop screaming,” Villanelle says. Eve can feel the light touch of her hand, so she stops. Her fingers close around Villanelle’s. 

But she has the sense she should pull away. She remembers being angry. 

“You—” Eve says, remembering all at once, again. Villanelle raises a finger to her lips. Then she turns to the men– EMTs, Eve realizes with relief, not police– and begins to speak to them, issuing rapid-fire directives in a language that is not English, and that Eve is pretty sure isn’t Italian either. 

  
  
  
  
  


If Eve hadn’t already pieced together where they were, the unmistakable fluorescent glare of the hospital would have given it away. Eve doesn’t like hospitals. The pain is burning now, like a hot poker to the skin. She keeps waiting for the doctors to put her under; instead she feels them insert something into her stomach. Only after does she feel the hit of morphine. The room smells of antiseptic. 

  
  


Over the next hours or days (time is unclear), Eve learns more. 

A doctor leans over her speaking French-accented English, and Eve realizes that sometime in the night Villanelle must have driven them over the Italian border into France. The doctor tells Eve they are concerned about an infection, but that she is otherwise remarkably stable. They allow Villanelle to visit. 

  
  
  
  


Villanelle looks exhausted. 

She’s changed out of the (ballgown) jumpsuit and put on a grey sweatshirt that echoes the dark circles under her eyes. She stretches when Eve wakes, as if she’s been asleep too, there in the cheap hospital chair beside Eve’s bed. 

“The doctors are very impressed with you,” Villanelle says without missing a beat. “I told them it was me— I stopped your bleeding— but I don’t think they believed me.”

Eve is faced with the impossible task of choosing what to say. 

“We’re in France,” she says, settling on something factual to orient herself. 

Villanelle nods. “We had to leave. They would be looking for us in Italy.” 

Eve swallows and wets her lips. Speaking at all is difficult through the haze of the drugs and the vibration her voice makes in her chest. Every word shoots pain through her ribs. 

“Who is _they_?”

Villanelle shrugs. “The Twelve. Mi6. Does it matter?”

Once it might have, but the world in which Eve cared about geopolitical games is receding quickly behind her. That was always more Carolyn’s scene anyway. Now the wide open space of Eve’s life, the life Eve has been creating through one questionable choice after another, looms in front of her. Across from her Villanelle smiles slightly, as if she can feel the void too. 

“We missed the plane,” she says. 

It takes Eve a second to place what she’s talking about. “You bought _plane_ _tickets_?”

Her memory of the time before the-- the burning point in her stomach gives another twinge-- _shooting_ is scattered but Eve remembers Villanelle’s delusions about what they would do together, now that they had killed together. 

_We’ll go to Alaska_ , Villanelle had said, _we’ll eat spaghetti._

 _I’ll be your little wifey and we can play house,_ Eve finishes in her own mind. The frightening part is that she’s not sure that’s not exactly what they’re going to do. 

“Two tickets to Juneau,” says Villanelle. “But you didn’t want to come.”

That’s a hell of a way to put it. Eve tries to put together, in her own mind, the timeline of her last twenty-four hours of consciousness: Villanelle manipulates Eve into killing Raymond, Villanelle manipulates Eve into leaving the scene, Villanelle proposes taking a holiday. Villanelle shoots Eve. 

Everything’s coming up Villanelle. 

“If I tried to leave,” Eve asks, “would you shoot me again?”

“No,” Villanelle says, looking down in a way that makes the shadows on her face stand out. It’s a nice piece of work, this show of guilt. Eve doesn’t believe it for a second but feels touched Villanelle even bothered to try. _And the Oscar goes to._

“So what do you want to do now?” 

The question touches the blank space Eve doesn’t want to touch yet. Villanelle won’t leave it alone— she wants Eve to choose— she keeps arranging these situations in the hope Eve will come down on her side, once and for all. 

“Where are we?” 

Medication hits Eve’s bloodstream at that moment and the words come out gargled and slow. 

“Nice, France,” Villanelle says helpfully. 

That’s good, then. Eve has never been to Nice but can conjure the general idea of it— a city in the south of France. She imagines eating gelato in the sun.

“I want ice cream,” Eve says. 

Villanelle brightens. “Okay, we can get ice cream.”

“Gelato,” Eve corrects herself. 

“I knew what you meant.”

Eve is fading again; liquid is moving through the tangled mass of tubes beside her bed. “How long am I going to be here?”

Villanelle laces her hands in her lap, her face taking on a pinched expression. “They don’t know. They say you have peritonitis, which is an infection of the--”

“Stomach,” Eve finishes. “I know.”

One eyebrow shoots up. “You _know_?” 

“I went to med school,” Eve says, and that’s her last thought before the medication forces her eyes closed, her consciousness narrowing to the warm dark of her inner eyelids.

  
  


Eve is in the hospital for five more days, strapped to tubes of antibiotics while fever burns the infection out of her, practicing her semester’s worth of college French while Villanelle hovers, speaking to the doctors. 

_Was she shot in the front or the back? Who shot her? Had there been an argument?_ Eve focuses on Villanelle, watching Eve closely behind the doctor’s left shoulder, and fights the urge to laugh. 

“I don’t know,” Eve tells them. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, we were arguing.” 

“ _De derriere_ ,” Villanelle says. 

It doesn’t take fluency to understand that one. Eve doesn’t remember turning her back on Villanelle, the bullet going into her torso and through her stomach. The bullet is still lodged inside her. It would be more invasive to remove it, Eve has gathered, although of course she should go in for surgery if complications emerge down the line. 

The doctors frown and ask Eve to name a perpetrator. “Can you remember who it was who shot you?” Villanelle says in parley between Eve and concerned Frenchmen in white. 

Before sliding back into consciousness every morning, Eve sees Raymond and the axe. She remembers the sick slide of the knife into Villanelle, how much blood there was. 

“ _C’etait une femme,_ ” Villanelle invents for her. _A woman._

“With dark hair,” Eve finishes, slumping back against the pillows to put an end to that line of questioning. “ _Italienne_.” 

That seems to satisfy them, leaving Villanelle to play nursemaid. Villanelle is nothing if not attentive, chatting up the nurses at their stations to get Eve extra morphine, falling asleep every night beside Eve in that chair. 

It’s not, not enough to make leaving the hospital with Villanelle anything other than a mistake.

But in between courses of antibiotics Eve lies there making silent calculations: how likely is it Italian investigators have discovered her involvement in Raymond’s death. Whether Carolyn will accept another return to the fold. Niko’s forgiveness. Her acceptance of his forgiveness. Her tolerance for him, for the stack of bills on that counter, the rhythm of their life together, a life unfinished-- shepard’s pie in the fridge, their annual vacation to Barcelona. Repairs they needed done on the house. 

A marriage she can’t imagine a future for, any more than she can imagine its ending. 

She ought to go back, if only to divorce him. She owes him that much. 

On the fifth day the nurses unstrap her and wheel her out to the hospital foyer so she can take her first steps on unsteady legs. _“Doucement, doucement._ ” _Gently,_ the nurses urge her, as if Eve might get up and start running. 

Villanelle beams in the doorway, backlit by the Mediterranean sun, and Eve’s traitor heart skips a beat. 

  
  


  
  
  


The city of Nice is a tidy arrangement of four main squares and a long promenade set against the foothills of the Alps. Eve is surprised at how small everything is, the pink and yellow facades reminding her of a movie set. Villanelle leads her out of Old Town, cursing the tourists. 

“But first,” Villanelle reminds her. “Gelato.”

They stop for gelato in the Place Rossetti, as promised. 

The door to the gelato shop is propped open— Eve sees black and white checkered tile, tables full of families. A French boy drops his cone on the pavement outside. Eve looks for a long time at the mango softening in the heat, before choosing stracciatella. 

“We will come back,” says Villanelle, carrying a cone full of lemon. “We will try them all.”

Eve, ravenous, eats too quickly. The cold cream running down her throat raises the hair on her arms. In the distance, the Mediterreanean churns slowly along the coastline. 

“You don’t want to be here,” says Villanelle. 

Eve stops to lick a drop of stracciatella trickling down her hand. “I don’t _not_ want to be here.”

She finds a trash can and throws away the dry part of the cone. 

There is a bus stop by the trash can with a political poster-- the red, white, and blue of the _tricolore_ , and a harsh blond woman Eve recognizes from news articles: Marine Le Pen, of the Front National. Eve flushes with discomfort. Her fever hasn’t quite left her, and the sun is beating down on them from a blue sky that seems endless and empty and frightening. 

“Have you ever been to Nice?” Villanelle asks. She puts her hands in her pockets, waiting for Eve.

The strip of white sand and cement the French call the _Promenade des Anglais_ spreads out before them. 

“I’ve seen postcards.”

“There is good shopping,” Villanelle says. “The movie stars come here to get ready for Cannes. All the villages along the coast too. We should rent a car and go.”

Eve shrugs. 

_This is your show_ , she almost says. But the idea of watching Villanelle try on one expensive outfit after another is oddly appealing. Maybe there would be a couch where she could sit and ease her pounding head. 

And maybe, with Villanelle distracted, Eve can slip away. 

_And yet…_

Aside from the small reserve she’d used to pay for their ice cream, Eve has no cash on hand, an identity that can only complicate her escape, and— there is the small fact Villanelle is a trained assassin who has a talent for finding Eve, specifically. She trusts Villanelle not to shoot her again, but doesn’t for a moment believe Villanelle would quietly let her leave. Anymore than she believed Villanelle’s guilt, or her tears, or any performance she’d made before that, no matter how convincing. 

Eve frowns. “Will your cards still work?”

“What, to rent the car?” 

Villanelle, in a mariner’s shirt and crisp linen pants, clearly dressed with a theme in mind today. The wind sweeps her bangs away from her face; she holds up a hand against the sun and laughs, falling into character as another French girl. “You know I work for Konstantin now. He understands, he will forgive me.” 

“I hope so.” Eve’s own resources have almost certainly dried up, probably as soon as it became clear to Carolyn Eve wasn’t coming back. She wonders when it happened, how much they’ve figured out. “Do we have to leave?”

“No, I just think it would be nice. Get away from people. But no, we will stay in Nice. Rent a room for the night.” They are on the water now— Villanelle smiles and kicks at the waves with a platform shoe. Her eyes are blank and sunlit. Carrying her flats in hand, Eve goes barefoot the rest of the way. 

They walk down the beach without a destination in mind— past the the Place Massena, past the old hotel called the _Negresco_ (Villanelle killed a Russian oil magnate there once, she says), and Eve’s headache recedes as she talks, both of them blinded by the sun reflecting off the water, a blue Eve supposes must be the inspiration behind the name of the Azure Coast. 

“Let’s stop,” Villanelle says suddenly, holding out a hand. “I want to go into that shop. Maybe we will even find something for you.” 

Eve can hardly say no. She is on day six of the same pants she was wearing when she was checked in to the hospital, and has borrowed one of Villanelle’s shirts. But Eve can tell immediately the boutique Villanelle has spotted, just off the walkway of the _Promenade,_ is out of Eve’s price range. The bell tinkles as they come in, and it takes her eyes a moment to adjust— inside, the shop is artificially darkened and silent as a tomb. Chic Frenchwomen flank the doors like attendants to the dead. 

“ _Bonjour_ ,” Villanelle says to the clerk, immediately narrowing her attention to the clothes— in particular, a red cape. 

“Red is your color.”

“No,” says Eve. _Even if it didn’t come with a 2500 euro price tag._

Villanelle holds out the cape for herself and hands it to the attendants to start a fitting room, then shrugs. “Suit yourself.” 

But as Villanelle makes her way around the perimeter of the room, amassing an armful of clothes, Eve feels out of place. There is a leather sofa near the dressing rooms and Eve sinks into it, to wait for Villanelle to come out. 

It feels oddly domestic— Eve feels almost like she should be holding Villanelle’s purse. She fingers the cell phone in her pocket, wondering if Kenny would hand the phone to Carolyn or if she would get a chance to explain to him what had happened first. _She shot me, she took me to the hospital, I almost died from an infection, and now we are going shopping together on the coast of France. Don’t hang up. Wait—_

Villanelle emerges from the fitting room to model one of her selections, a grey silk dress blouse and cream colored slacks. 

Eve nods, but when Villanelle pulls the door aside to reveal a white suit jacket whatever noise of approval she’d been about to make dies in her throat. 

With one hand Villanelle lets down the très chic Audrey Tautou bun she’d been wearing all afternoon and her hair falls around her shoulders in loose waves, a contrast to the sharp white lines of her jacket. 

“You look nice,” Eve says, after a moment. 

Villanelle smiles in a way that borders on a smirk. 

She disappears back into the dressing room and Eve expects to see another _look_ , but Villanelle says through the door she doesn’t like a certain dress on, but would Eve like to try it?

“No,” Eve says, folding her arms. It’s cold in the shop after baking in the sun all afternoon, and she suddenly feels very drab in this room full of clothes that cost more than her old mortgage payment. She feels _old_. Her stomach has begun to throb again where the bullet went in. 

“Please try it,” Villanelle says through the door. “Look at how unique it is.”

She opens the door a few inches and shows Eve a fistful of crumpled dress. Eve can’t see much but it looks sparkly and insubstantial.

“I am definitely too old for that.”

Breathless and half-dressed, Villanelle comes out of the fitting room again. “Who said this?” she says, sounding almost angry. 

“No one,” Eve says, feeling defensive. “It’s just— where the _hell_ would I wear that?”

“Dinner,” says Villanelle. She shuts the door and her voice becomes muffled again. “I made reservations for eight o’clock.”

  
  
  


They leave the shop with several bags in tow and book a room in a boutique hotel across the street. Their room faces the water. 

  
  
  
  


The dress Eve leaves with, the dress that is now hers, is distinctive: black chiffon and silk, studded from hem to neckline with small round glass mirrors. The effect is not as disorienting in their hotel room as it had been on a pedestal in the dressing rooms, but it’s still as easy to get lost in her own reflection, refracted a hundred times in the tiny mirrors embroidered into the dress. 

Eve’s face is everywhere and nowhere. The mirrors on her chest and shoulders— over her heart— display her reflection more or less without distortion, but in the studs lining her sleeves Eve is just a vague intimation of light, warped and unrecognizable. 

Villanelle appears and lays a hand on her shoulder. 

“Are you feeling alright?” 

Eve nods and pushes her bra strap under the dress. She slips on a pair of heels— slightly too big, borrowed from Villanelle. 

“A glass of wine would be nice.” 

“We will get you a glass of wine. Come on.”

Villanelle takes her hand again, like she did when they were going through the tunnel toward the coliseum, and Eve’s stomach flips. The day has been dream-like— she’s not completely sure she won’t wake up in London. 

But if it’s a dream, it’s a convincing one, complete with smog and honking cars as Villanelle hails a taxi outside of the hotel. The room Villanelle booked for them is small, intimate, with a balcony. Villanelle certainly planned it— the way she’d likely planned everything about this day while Eve was still asleep in that hospital bed nursing her infection. A chill runs through Eve but it could easily be the wind coming across the water. The mindless happiness that envelops her like a cloud frightens her even more. 

_What if I don’t want to leave?_

Eve gets into the cab and watches the stream of traffic, the lights lining the _Promenade des Anglais_ illuminating the faces of tourists and chain-smoking locals alike. 

Villanelle’s hand inches towards Eve’s but doesn’t touch her. She can feel the warmth of her skin. 

“What are you thinking?” 

“I’m thinking you planned this,” says Eve.

“Does it matter if I did?” says Villanelle. Her eyes are so very dark in the dim light. “I just want you to enjoy yourself, Eve. Especially after—”

 _Use of my name— a technique to establish intimacy._ _Feigned guilt— creates trust._

The strange thing about Villanelle is that Eve knows, somehow, that most of what Villanelle does are the calculated actions of a sociopath, and yet knowing doesn’t change a damn thing. She’s long since put aside her professional knowledge when dealing with her. 

“I am,” Eve says, “enjoying myself.” _And surprised to find that it’s true._

The restaurant is, of course, expensive. Eve would hardly expect anything less. She and Villanelle are not the only ones dressed to the nines. Eve pulls at the fabric of her dress as it catches along her skin. The foyer is full of men in dark suits and women in satin. The restaurant seems to have been laid out with privacy in mind— every table seems to be in its own corner. 

_I’ll look after you,_ Villanelle had said. Eve wonders if this is part of the apology, money the only language she knows for love. 

Villanelle reaches for Eve’s hand before she stops herself, for the second time. Is she stopping herself or is Eve shying away? Maybe she is giving Villanelle too credit again, credit she may or may not deserve. _Maybe after a glass of wine…_

But if Eve has to drink to let Villanelle touch her, it doesn’t take much to realize this is the wrong thing, again, another decision she will regret. But Eve hasn’t left yet. She could have, she could have put up a fight or gone to a police station or called Niko from a pay phone and let whatever happened then, happen. But instead she is wearing several thousand dollars of Valentino and sitting across from Villanelle over candlelight. 

The wine goes to Eve’s head instantly after days of being hooked to a morphine drip. 

She closes her eyes. 

“You like that a lot, don’t you?” Light is playing over Villanelle’s face when Eve opens her eyes. “You need it.”

Eve frowns, reminded of the woman in the airport who suggested she was an addict. “I don’t need it. I appreciate it. There is a difference.”

Villanelle smiles. “Okay.” 

“Don’t ask me to decide anything,” Eve says, on a whim. “Tonight, I mean. Don’t ask me to be certain.”

“Okay.” Villanelle stops smiling now, looking at Eve very intently. “You are here though.”

She leans forward. 

“Which means a lot to me.”

Villanelle has put on perfume. The scent reaches Eve and reminds her of Villanelle’s neck, the fall of her hair. A pounding sensation starts in Eve’s ears as the wine warms her face and chest. 

“Why did you run?”

Eve can’t remember; that moment in the old agora is as inaccessible to her now as this night might have seemed then. 

“And why don’t you run now?”

It’s because (Eve thinks, the wine clearing her head) Eve wants it _over_ , whatever this thing between them is, and one good fuck might put an end to it at last— and then she can go back to Carolyn and blame everything on Villanelle. Have her cake and eat it too. _You’re not the only one who can think like this,_ Eve thinks, watching Villanelle. _Play games like this. I can manipulate you too._

Eve is not sure when it came to her— maybe the gelato shop or when she looked at herself wearing a dress made of dozens of mirrors. It came over her unconsciously, as subtle as Villanelle’s touch in the cab. Just enough for Eve for feel it, the way forward. 

Eve smiles and watches lust darken Villanelle’s eyes, her teeth indenting her bottom lip. 

She takes another sip of wine. “Who’s to say I won’t?”

  
  
  


They order pasta with truffles and mushrooms. 

  
  
  
  


“If I left you’d find me,” says Eve in the cab ride home. “I know that.” The driver takes the back roads, plunging them into darkness without the light of the streets along the bay. It feels safer to say this in the dark. 

Eve can’t see Villanelle’s face but she hears the hiss of the breath she releases, and feels rather than sees her turn away. 

They spent most of dinner complimenting the food, the ambiance— then they’d started to make fun of the other patrons. It was _fun_ , in a way Eve hadn’t known Villanelle knew how to have fun. Villanelle told Eve the story of the birthday party she threw for Konstantin over dessert, 

She’d watched Villanelle lick tiramisu off the spoon. She'd wondered if she’d still taste like amaretto when they kissed.

“How did you know that?” 

Villanelle lets her hand drift towards Eve’s again; this time they connect, pinky to pinky. They’ve touched before, brushing hands, holding each other at arm’s length, but this is different, more intentional. It seals something into place.

“Because you said you loved me,” Eve says. This is a piece of her memory of the day in the agora that slid back into place over dinner— she remembers, now, Villanelle declaring that Eve was hers. 

“You said I didn’t understand what that word meant.” 

Villanelle sounds hurt, and for a moment it irritates Eve. 

“You don’t,” she says without thinking, and she doesn’t need to see Villanelle’s face to know when she gets glassy-eyed, when her lower lip starts trembling.

Eve is risking everything but honesty is a curious game to play, now that they’ve come this far. If Villanelle rejects her, she will walk away. If Villanelle accepts the barb and the conversation continues, she has lost nothing. 

“My mother,” Eve says, and her voice cracks. “My mother— my mother sat with my father every day when he was dying. Alzheimer’s disease. He forgot her name, where they’d lived, and the date of their wedding day. Sometimes he’d think it was a stranger in the room, and he’d get agitated and ask her to leave. She never left.”

Eve is glad Villanelle can’t see her face. 

“That is love.” 

Tires squeal against gravel; and the cab pulls up the hotel. The car is still moving when Eve throws open the door.

“Eve—”

Villanelle lingers behind to pay the cab driver but catches up before Eve can vanish inside the hotel. She lays a tentative hand on Eve’s shoulder from behind. 

“Eve, I—”

Eve turns and kisses her in the doorway. 

  
  
  
  


The hotel Villanelle picked for them is over a hundred and fifty years old, and by the time Eve and Villanelle reach the landing on the third floor where their room looks out to the east, they’ve kissed in the doorway in the front door, the foyer, the stairwell, and finally one last furious kiss in the elevator, where Villanelle presses the button to close the door when Eve whispers in Villanelle’s ear she’d prefer a little more privacy for this. 

Villanelle presses Eve up against the red velvet upholstery on the elevator walls and Eve has a fleeting thought that she might have preferred a more tentative first kiss-- sweeter, perhaps, maybe even tender. But that would defeat the purpose— they’ll never have a life together, not really, but sex is within the realm of possibility. Eve’s plan depends on it. 

Villanelle’s hands are running through Eve’s hair as she pins her, and Eve trips in her too-tall heels and loses a shoe, feeling her bare foot sink into the carpet as her spine flattens against the wall. 

The moan coming up from Villanelle’s throat goes straight to the place between Eve’s thighs. 

Her mouth tastes like wine. Not amaretto— but wine, the same wine Eve had been drinking. Eve’s mind completely empties of thought; her hand finds Villanelle’s waist, her other hand the feline curve of her back. 

“God--”

The elevator dings and the doors spring open, to reveal an older man in a distinguished suit and his wife. 

“Sorry,” Eve says, at their astonished faces. She wipes a smear of lipstick from her cheek with the back of her hand. 

Villanelle shrieks with laughter all the way down the hall. 

Eve fumbles with key card for what feels like an unfairly long minute.

They kiss again as the door swings shut until Villanelle flicks on the light and Eve sees her own face, her disheveled hair, and an expression as stunned and unsure as the couple at the elevator had looked. 

“Are you okay with this?”

Eve takes off the other shoe to stand barefoot on the tile floor.

“I don’t know,” says Eve, and she can’t stop the insane laughter bubbling up in her throat, and she laughs until her throat is raw and she can hear it ringing in her own ears. 

“Eve—”

Eve gets out a bottle of white wine from the minifridge.

Villanelle looks frightened. “Eve—”

Eve uncorks the bottle and pours the wine straight down her throat, and Villanelle gasps. 

“Eve, put the bottle down and talk to me.”

Eve puts the bottle down but doesn’t let it go. She’s standing barefoot in a seven thousand dress she still has no idea how Villanelle paid for, who died to pay for it. 

When she looks back, Villanelle’s— Oksana’s— eyes are full of tears. “What is wrong, Eve?”

Eve lets out a harsh laugh. 

“You’ve wrecked my goddamn life,” she says. “Destroyed everything I have.” 

Oksana’s tears burst and fall down her cheeks and Eve feels bad for that, briefly, but mostly what she feels is the enormity— the utter emptiness— of the void that has opened up in front of her. 

“And I feel _nothing_. And I don’t care.”

Villanelle has shrugged off her jacket— it lies on a pristine white heap on the floor. She stands beside it with her mouth agape, hair in disarray, and Eve wishes Villanelle would stand there forever, looking at Eve with her pretty, empty doe eyes. 

The tears have stopped now, replaced with fascination. Fascination, and a terrible hunger. 

“Because you are mine now.” 

_No,_ a voice deep within Eve whispers. “Yes,” she says out loud.

“What do you want, Eve? I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Take off my dress.”

Villanelle comes up behind her, the same as the day Eve wore that black and white dress, the same care she had that day. Eve feels Villanelle’s breath on her neck. 

One strap slips off her shoulder with a jingle of glass, and Villanelle places her lips on Eve’s neck. She kisses down to the collarbone with a gentleness that makes Eve recoil. 

“No,” Villanelle says softly. “Not like this.”

Eve turns to face her, holding her dress in place with one hand. “Not like what?”

“You are angry with me.” 

“You have no empathy. How the fuck do you know that I’m angry at you?”

Villanelle lets out another anguished cryand Eve can see the start of another round of tears. Real or fake, Eve doesn’t know, but in the last few hours it has almost ceased to matter. Wherever they are now, they are beyond that, dancing on the border between reality and fantasy. 

“I don’t know. I just _know_ , when it’s you. You’re different.” 

Villanelle’s mouth takes on one of its petulant looks, her lower lip shiny and slick. Eve wants to take it in her teeth. 

“We’re both different. So different that we are the same.”

“Is that why you shot me?”

“You stabbed me!”

 _She looks good angry,_ Eve thinks, watching Villanelle flush with rage. 

“I thought you knew! You stab me, so I shoot you, so we are the same. We are marked the same. I couldn’t let you forget.” She shakes her head. “I thought you understood.”

A beat of silence passes, and then Eve’s voice when it returns to her is quiet. 

“I do.”

Villanelle simply stares, her face inches away from Eve, and Eve is reminded of that moment in her kitchen when it all began— the silence on the other end of knifepoint, the smell of Villanelle’s hair. 

“Eve—” 

Eve cups Villanelle’s jaw. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

Another kiss unfolds like the unraveling of a string. Tender this time, Eve’s hand on Villanelle’s cheek, Villanelle’s hand winding in Eve’s hair. Eve feels something tighten in her throat, something that feels remarkably like fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eve's mirror dress is loosely based on [this dress](https://cdn-img.instyle.com/sites/default/files/styles/684xflex/public/1551887445/sandra-oh-01.jpg?itok=t3XPoLd2) Sandra Oh wore in a photoshoot.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised things would lighten up and they do in this chapter, starting with the smut. Happy New Year! (Please @ the FBI do not arrest me for the research I did on contract killing for this chapter.)

“I thought you said you’d never done this before,” Villanelle says, mid-kiss. 

“I meant the knife part.”

“So you’ve slept with a woman?”

Eve had, once. A girl in college, a mistake she’d blamed on too many tequila shots. She’d looked a little like Villanelle, in truth, the same dark blond hair, the same delicate mouth. The look in Villanelle’s eyes is all her own. How had Eve described it, while Bill laughed at her? _Awake._

“I did.”

Villanelle frowns. “Who was she?” 

The jealousy isn’t real but it is unexpectedly charming. “Some girl,” Eve says. “I barely knew her.” 

“You are lying. You had a grand romance.”

“No, that was you.” Eve lifts the grey silk blouse over Villanelle’s head, careful not to catch it on her earrings. She winces at her own unintentional invocation of Anna, but Villanelle doesn’t seem to register the reference, looking at Eve with that predatory smile, a cat with the cream. 

Eve is still holding her dress over her chest. She didn’t wear anything underneath, which means the moment she lets it drop she will be bare for Villanelle to see her, to touch her. Villanelle, who performs concern in between kisses full of hunger, who is making this harder than it needs to be. 

“Are you sure, Eve?” 

_Sex— this is just sex._ Eve grits her teeth and says, “Yes, I’m sure.” 

“Okay.” 

Villanelle looks good stripped down; sleek and strong and upright. Something about her upper body is almost equestrian, reminding Eve of jockeys, with the same physical ease, the tightly coiled energy. 

Eve is not sure what Villanelle sees when she looks at her body but Eve feels soft and old next to Villanelle. 

“Please, Eve.” Villanelle touches Eve’s throat, Eve’s shoulders, and she comes closer for a kiss, a hint of her tongue like a promise warming Eve all over, her hands tracing down Eve’s back. And Eve drops her dress to the floor. 

“Please, Eve,” she says again, and Eve doesn’t know what she’s asking for, but she’s willing to give. Eve nods and Villanelle presses her face into Eve’s neck with the same gentleness she used to slip off the straps of Eve’s dress. It annoys her again. 

“I’m not made of glass.” 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s a little late for that,” Eve says, and wraps her fingers around the back of Villanelle’s neck and leans into Villanelle’s body, taking them both down, sinking both of them into the hotel bed, with Villanelle straddling Eve. Villanelle’s smile widens viciously and Eve feels herself getting wet again. Villanelle strips off her bra with athletic grace, presenting her breasts to Eve. 

Eve doesn’t think before taking one in her mouth. Villanelle is immaculate, like a Titian painting, and Eve somehow knows how to roll her tongue over a hardening nipple to make Villanelle’s legs start to tremble. 

“Not so fast,” Villanelle says with difficulty, lowering her head to bite Eve’s neck. “You’re greedy.” 

_Are you complaining_ , Eve starts to say, but then Villanelle grinds her hips into Eve, pinning her to the bed. Villanelle arches her back to kiss Eve all over her torso, beginning at the hollow of her throat down to her stomach. 

“Oh god.”

“God’s not here.”

Villanelle changes position to tease Eve along her thighs and hips with her tongue, her hands running between Eve’s back and the bed to eventually grab Eve’s ass. 

Eve lets out a gasp, and Villanelle smirks. 

“You have a gorgeous ass.” 

This is nothing Eve hasn’t heard before, but something about hearing those words in Villanelle’s clipped accent makes her feel as flustered as she’d been when she heard it the first time. 

“Has anyone ever spanked you?” 

Eve feels her blood rush downwards, making her lose her breath and stutter when she tries to speak. 

“We’ll have to try that sometime.” Villanelle’s voice is the verbal equivalent of a wink. She suddenly sounds assured now. There’s a rush of air when Villanelle rolls down Eve’s underwear, and Villanelle releases an admiring sigh, placing a tentative kiss over her vulva that sends a shudder through Eve’s body. 

“I told you, you need to let yourself go sometimes,” Villanelle says, her voice a complement to the ringing in Eve’s ears. “So _go_.”

She licks Eve open. 

Eve shivers again, coming apart under Villanelle’s tongue, ignoring the frightened part of herself, the part that says _stop_ and _think about what you’re doing_ , the part that sounds like Niko, like her father. 

“Eve, I am here,” Villanelle says, sensing the shift in Eve’s attention. She wraps her arms around Eve’s thighs and pulls her closer. When she kisses her again she pushes her tongue in deeper, hitting a place that erases Eve’s thoughts. 

The sweet singing near-pain of orgasm is building, and Eve thinks of what Villanelle will look like with her come all over her face, whether her lips will be as swollen and red and wet as they have been in her imagination during the thousands of times Eve has imagined fucking her. 

“Your hand,” Eve says. 

She wants to taste herself on Villanelle’s tongue, to rake her fingernails down Villanelle’s back when her fingers pull release from inside of her. 

“You want me inside you?” 

Villanelle does something with her tongue that nearly makes Eve come then and there. But then she reconsiders, acquiescing to Eve with a muttered “alright.” Villanelle slides two fingers into Eve at the same time as she comes up for a sloppy kiss, her breasts brushing Eve’s chest and making her hunger flare. 

“You can put three.” 

“Three easily becomes four,” Villanelle says into Eve’s ear, and Eve stiffens, white light starting to wash through her, her body tingling like fire. 

“Let go, Eve.”

Eve does, losing seconds or minutes to nothingness, the hot blank void that dissolves the boundaries of her body, her mind. It seems stupid now, that it took them this long to do this. _This is nothing._ It was nothing all along. It is a body being a body, doing what a body does, hardly worth all the hiding and fighting and stabbing and running. Just sex, nothing less than sex. Nothing less than the full blackout bliss Eve feels like she’s been fighting this entire time, than finally allowing it to win. 

Eve rolls her head back and when she comes back, when she finally opens her eyes, Villanelle is watching her, her expression mesmerized. 

“That was a long one. Do you always do that? Leave the earth like that?”

“No,” Eve says, still returning.

“I thought you were never going to come back down.”

They kiss again, mindless, salty kisses, and Villanelle lays her head on Eve’s chest and Eve inhales deeply, feeling the night around them pressing in from all sides. 

A garçon brings them a fruit platter in the morning, waking Eve out of dead sleep. Villanelle is already awake, half-dressed at the balcony, watching the day come in. 

“ _Mesdemoiselles_ ,” says the French boy, laying the tray at the foot of their bed. 

Villanelle receives him, while Eve hides flushes and sinks beneath the sheets before remembering it doesn’t matter if this boy sees her with Villanelle. 

“ _Votre carte, madame, a été refusée —_ ”

“I have another one.” 

Villanelle shrugs and hands him a different credit card. He runs it through the reader and frowns. 

“ _Je suis desolé—"_

“Cash then,” Villanelle says, her irritation beginning to grow. “ _Espèces_.”

“ _En espèces_ , ok.” 

“That’s odd,” says Eve when the door shuts behind him. 

Villanelle sighs. “These places, they don’t know how to do anything.” She leans on the bed and surveys the fruit. “Plum?”

Eve accepts it. “You ordered us breakfast.”

“Of course.” 

There is something softer about Villanelle today, something open but tentative, almost shy. She watches Eve eat with an intensity that should be off-putting but isn’t. With a fleeting thought she remembers the night the shepard’s pie, the bread, the gelato. Villanelle is always offering her things. Food. Clothing and perfume-- the dress Eve doesn’t want to think about tearing off the night before. She gives to watch Eve take. 

“You fell asleep on me last night,” Villanelle says. 

Eve lets out a bark of laughter. “I did not. We were-- we were done. Weren’t we?”

“Oh, Eve. I can tell you’ve only been with men.”

“And one woman,” Eve says peevishly. A thought occurs to her. “Was I bad?” 

Before falling asleep, Eve had considered reciprocating, the idea suddenly appealing to her, but it hadn’t seemed like Villanelle needed or wanted that from her. 

Villanelle laughs. “You could never be bad. You were--” She looks over Eve’s face, searching for an adjective. 

“You were _beautiful_ last night. And so free. I like to see you this free.”

With one hand she tucks a curl of hair behind Eve’s ear. Eve almost loses her breath. _Does she think that last night was…._

“You got angry with me.”

Eve looks away, embarrassed now to remember that display in the morning light. 

“I liked that.” Villanelle frowns. “Not at the time but-- I like when you tell me things. How you feel.”

“I shouldn’t have said—”

“I don’t like when you drink.”

Eve feels a shot hitting her blood like morphine. “I don’t like when you kill people.” 

Of course, there was _Raymond, the axe, fleeing Italy for a crime she was complicit in,_ but Villanelle doesn’t mention it, she doesn’t say anything for a long moment. 

“Okay,” she says slowly, biting into a mandarin. “This is a big topic. Let’s not talk about this now.” 

_You really think there’s going to be a later._ Eve can feel the venom building in her throat. But Villanelle lets the whole thing drop, and Eve can’t afford to tip her hand yet, not when the day might still present an opportunity to leave. Eve almost pities her, for a moment, before she remembers: _sociopath_ and _fleeting and shallow emotions_. 

Eve takes a shower; Villanelle is at the mirror, frowning at herself wearing the same blazer as the night before. When Eve comes out with her hair wet Villanelle turns and stares, biting her lip. 

“Oh, it’s not that exciting.”

“Do you just say that, or do you really not know?”

Eve knows; Eve pretends not to know. Being attractive is flattering at best, inconvenient most of the time, dangerous at worst. For Villanelle it is a weapon in her arsenal, the way she uses it is fascinating to Eve. It’s something she’s often wanted to try herself. 

“I know.”

Eve takes one last look at herself in the mirror. 

“Good,” Villanelle says, holding the door open for Eve. 

  
  
  


“I want to buy some sunglasses today,” says Villanelle when they reach the lobby. “And to book us a trip to the countryside.”

Villanelle has brought her laptop in a big white leather bag that matches her suit jacket. It’s astonishing how well she fits in with the well-heeled crowd around the front desk. Some hotel staff trail behind new guests pulling clothes racks full of dry cleaning, while others load suitcases for outgoing guests in Aston Martins and little Alfa Romeo roadsters idling in the drive. 

“ _Mesdames! Mesdames!_ ”

A clerk flags down Eve and Villanelle. 

“There is a problem with your credit cards on file,” the clerk says in English to Eve. 

“They’ve shut off your accounts,” Eve says, feeling the blood drain out of her head. “That’s why they didn’t take your card this morning.” 

Villanelle shoots her a silencing look and turns to the clerk. “There has been a mistake. I will make some phone calls and we will solve it right away.”

  
  


Eve waits until they are outside on the drive before saying anything else. 

“And how is that going to go? ‘Sorry I botched our job but please refill my fun money account?’” 

Villanelle looks despondent. “I thought he would forgive me.”

Privately, Eve doesn’t consider Konstantin the forgiving type, but their relationship has always been a mystery to her; she won’t pretend to understand it. 

“I’m not going to call him.” Villanelle raises an eyebrow at Eve. “I think it is time for me to get a job.”

They’ve left the hotel and are now wandering aimlessly down a side street until they come to a little tree-lined square; Eve takes a seat heavily on a park bench and rubs her temples and groans.

“We have my credit card,” Eve says. “Niko won’t be happy with me though.”

A strange looks flits across Villanelle’s face. “How do you know he will find out?”

Eve stares at her. “He’ll know.”

It wouldn’t help the divorce proceedings, to be sure, if she stole from him, especially if the reason was to fund an extravagant continental vacation with her _lover (oh god, my_ lover _,_ Eve doesn’t have time to contemplate the seismic shift that brings). She can just picture herself explaining to a judge in a powdered wig. _Do they still wear wigs for civil cases?_

Villanelle sits down beside her and starts thinking out loud. 

“No, I will make us more money. I don’t need Konstantin. I don’t need any handler. It’s better this way, actually.”

She opens her phone and starts flicking through apps. 

“We— have—” Villanelle smiles weakly. “Enough money for coffee.” 

They find a cafe. Eve orders a shot of espresso and downs it in one sip; Villanelle orders something rich and frothy. 

“You’re a cheap date.” Villanelle gestures at Eve’s empty espresso cup. 

“You weren’t saying that last night.”

Villanelle reaches for Eve’s hand and strokes her thumb; Eve squirms. “Last night was special.” 

“It’s kind of a downgrade, isn’t it?” Eve says, unable to resist needling her. “Is this how you treat all your dates, the morning after?”

Villanelle pouts. “I didn’t want this to happen—”

“I’m kidding.” 

Villanelle stops stroking Eve’s hand and just holds it for one long moment, looking into Eve’s eyes with an amused, gentle expression. “You are more relaxed than you were last night.”

Eve searches for a quip in reply, but nothing comes. She can still feel the release Villanelle gave her from the night before-- a residual tingle at the bottom of her spine, a sense of ease in her hips that wasn’t there yesterday. 

She realizes, dimly, that she’s blushing. 

Villanelle laughs in delight. 

“Shut up.” 

Villanelle laughs harder, squeezing her hand and then letting it go. 

Across the room, an older French woman, all scarf and perfectly coiffed silver hair, gives Eve and Villanelle a pointed glare. 

_Oh, piss off_. 

She’s not sure whether what attracted her attention, whether they were too loud, or whether she just disliked the sight of two women holding hands, but Eve is surprised by the anger that bubbles up easily inside her. Her limbs humming with adrenaline, Eve twitches to get up and tell her off. 

“Oh, don’t,” Villanelle says in a low voice. “She’s a sour old crone. Probably tastes like spoiled milk.”

Eve looks away, an old anxiety tickling her. _And how did I taste?_ She wants to ask Villanelle. It’s been years since she’s had cause to worry-- Niko hadn’t, generally, and when he’d tried his mustache had made her feel like being repeatedly nuzzled by a furry animal. So she’d asked him to stop. 

Somewhere, she was sure, he was out there having missionary sex with Gemma, and that thought gives her unexpected joy. 

“What are you thinking about?”

Eve turns back to Villanelle. “Leaving my husband.”

Villanelle looks shocked, both eyebrows raising towards her hairline, and Eve burns with embarrassment, immediately regretting the honesty.

“Whoa. Where did that thought come from?” 

“I mean,” Eve says, trying to back-pedal, “I’ve given it a lot of thought, and he and I are done.” She shakes her head. “That’s all. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

“Because—” Villanelle looks like she’s struggling with her words too. “It is relevant to me?”

“It’s not. It’s not— relevant. It doesn’t mean anything. Other than, I—”

Eve shrugs, wondering when the conversation wandered into this territory and wishing she could get them out. 

“I just want to leave my husband. That’s it.”

Villanelle snorts, but doesn’t dare to pursue the subject further, which makes Eve absurdly grateful, considering there are questions Eve can’t or won’t answer, not even now. 

Still looking amused, Villanelle gets her lap top out of her bag and unfolds it on the table. 

“I want you to pick the target.”

Now it is Eve’s turn to blink in surprise. 

“The _target_?”

Villanelle sighs. “You know what I do. I thought-- you know-- if you wanted to help--”

“If I wanted to _help_ ? With _killing_ someone?”

“Shh!” Villanelle looks around at the crowded coffee shop. “Keep your voice down.”

“Sorry.” 

Villanelle huffs, typing her password into the computer. “There are all sorts of targets. Some of them are very bad. Men who deserve to be in jail. But they’re rich men, so they’re not.”

“So it’s up to us to dispense capital punishment?” 

Villanelle waves a hand as if to say, _I don’t see the problem._

Eve sinks in her chair, a helpful voice in the back of her mind reminding her it’s a fine time for her to discover moral principles, now that a man is dead at her hand. _Raymond was awful though_ , another voice tells her. Every time she remembers Villanelle’s reddening face, his hands choking her to near-unconsciousness, she feels a putrid flash of rage. She wonders if he’d ever done the same to those children he’d spoke so disparagingly of. _Or his wife._

Eve sighs. 

“Okay.”

Villanelle peers at Eve over her laptop. 

“Okay, you will help me?”

“No,” says Eve. “I mean, I will look at the targets. But I’m not going to help you.”

Villanelle heaves an exasperated sigh. “I’m not asking you to. I will do everything myself. I just thought you could help me this way. So you feel better about it.”

“I will not ‘feel better about it.’” 

But Eve can hear the lack of venom in her own voice and the corners of Villanelle’s mouth turn up in a victorious smile. 

For a few minutes Villanelle drops into a state of concentration that makes Eve curious despite herself. While thinking she runs her hands through her hair absently. Eve thinks of hacker jokes she could make; she doesn’t say any out loud. _She could give Kenny a run for his money_ , she thinks, watching Villanelle’s hands move over the keyboard, the slight lip bite she does whenever she hits the space bar. 

Eve comes around to watch her. 

“What is that, the assassin dark web?”

Eve sees Villanelle click on an icon that looks like an onion. 

“Yes. We are behind a lot of proxies.”

_She trusts me_ , Eve realizes. _To show me this. She knows I’m not going to turn her in to MI6._ They’d passed that barrier long ago-- ever since Villanelle began working with her, ever since it had become clear that the structures behind them both were not as distinct as she’d thought. But so much has happened, so quickly, that the change came over without Eve even realizing it. 

After the VPN finishes booting up and they move through a bewildering array of proxy ISPs, Villanelle pulls up a website with a dark grey background and red lettering. 

Behind a few more logins and another series of ISP changes-- Eve is surprised to see how slow the connection can be-- they come to a page with a grid full of faces, each with a description and a price.

“Contracts,” says Villanelle with clear distaste. 

Eve swallows. Something about seeing those photographs, row after row of real flesh-and-blood people, human beings, each with a birth date and a mother and almost assuredly, someone who would miss them if they died, gives her chills. 

“Eve,” Villanelle says gently. 

“No, it’s alright.” Eve swallows again. “I know this exists. It would still exist, whether we’re looking at it or not.”

Villanelle slows down her scrolling, giving Eve time to read the descriptions. Most are in English, most of those that aren’t are in Russian, German, or Chinese; a few are in Korean (Eve digs deep into her childhood for those Saturdays in Korean school). The ads she can read have a clear common theme. 

“This is why I hate contract work,” Villanelle complains, rolling her cursor over a description of a CHEATING HUSBAND - $1000 UPFRONT. “So much drama. None of it important.”

“I’m not killing anyone over their personal life,” Eve says stiffly. 

Why this boundary seems more important than anything else would be, she can’t say, but it is the feeling she has as they come to the end of the results. Looking at all those perfectly average faces, alongside so many hysterical captions makes Eve feel ill. 

“Anything good in Russian?” Eve says, trying for a light tone. 

“No.” Villanelle twists her hair into a ponytail, then lets it fall to her shoulders, making a noise of frustration. “Nothing over $10000.” 

_That’s $10000 more than we have presently_ , Eve resists the urge to say. 

“Wait. I know one other place to look.” 

Villanelle closes the tab with the grey background and red lettering and opens another type, typing in what looks like a nonsensical series of letters and numbers. 

“Konstantin showed me this once-- I’m trying to remember--”

But the string of letters she enters brings up nothing but an error message. Eve watches as Villanelle tries several more times, each time adjusting the order of the digits or adding or subtracting them. 

Finally something flickers on the screen— and another site begins to load in new tab. Villanelle lights up in a way that would have made Eve worry, were they still adversaries. (Another change that happened without her notice— when had she stopped thinking of Villanelle as an enemy?)

“This is where the bigger stuff is.” 

The site superficially resembles the first, with the same grey background, but the lettering is black instead of red and Eve can tell at a glance that this clientele is different from the other contract site, a cut above. These faces are less forgettable-- mostly men, more grizzled than the previous group, many with shaved heads and tattoos-- the kind of people Eve might have presumed to be assassins before acquiring her professional knowledge. Sprinkled among the men are a few women-- Eve thinks she spots a greyed-out profile of the Ghost. 

“These are hits for other assassins,” Eve says. 

Villanelle nods. “Most of them. Not all.”

Villanelle scrolls down to to look at the rest and suddenly Eve can’t breathe. 

“Oh my god. It’s you. You’re on here.”

And so it is, the same mugshot Eve had looked at so many times herself during her search for Villanelle, but now the sight of it turns her blood to ice. 

To Eve’s surprise, Villanelle only laughs. “Of course I am! I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I wasn’t.” She clicks on her own profile. “I do want to know what I’m wanted for, though,” she adds, in a conversational tone. 

Reading the paragraphs of Cyrillics, Villanelle groans. 

“Aaron Peel. He has friends. They are coming after me.” 

“Wonderful.” Eve tries to be flip; it comes out as sarcasm, 

“I’m not worried about them,” Villanelle says, clicking back to the main page. “Someone in his own organization probably ordered the hit on him; they will have an interest in protecting me.” 

Eve frowns, feeling the line between her eyes crinkling. “Or Carolyn ordered it.”

“Or someone working through Carolyn.” 

Eve shakes her head. Conversations like this always make her head spin. The prickle of worry she once felt about Carolyn’s motivations has been replaced by full-fledged suspicion. However, she doesn’t have time to unravel it and even if she did, no interest in battling whatever hornet’s nest she would undoubtedly provoke. _I was used_ , she thinks anyway. _Carolyn was using me._ She bats the thought away. Something too large, and irrelevant to the world as she lives in it now, with sunlight streaming through the windows of the cafe and Villanelle clicking through profiles of soon-to-be-dead men. 

Villanelle pauses over a photograph of a thin white man in wire-rimmed glasses. 

“I know this man,” she says, to herself more than Eve.

“He doesn’t look like much of an assassin.” 

“He’s not. This board is not only for assassins, but for anyone who is higher-priced. People offer more money for someone who is hard to kill, whether they are an assassin themselves, or they are a politician or something, someone with a lot of security that will be hard to get past.” 

Eve looks closer; there is something in his blue-eyed gaze that makes her skin crawl. 

“I’m not surprised to see him,” Villanelle says, reading the details of the hit on him. “He sent his ex-mistress to prison for tax evasion after she outed their affair to his wife. There have been hits put out on all three of them— this man, the wife, the mistress. Crazy situation.”

“Why is he not on the other site? The— the revenge site?”

“Because he’s an important man,” Villanelle says, in a tone that implies that this is the general consensus, rather than her personal opinion. “He is the chief executive of the European branch of an American oil and gas company.” 

Eve can guess which one. “So he has a lot of money.” 

“Oh yes.” Villanelle studies Eve’s face. “He is also a major donor-- one of the very biggest-- to the Front National here in France.” 

Eve’s lips part and she can feel rather than hear the rush of air that moves into her body and gathers in her center before moving out to her arms, her feet. Something inside of her seems to go still, like the calm after a breaking wave. 

“Him,” she says.

Villanelle smirks. “He will net us thirty thousand dollars, with five thousand upfront.”

She squeezes Eve’s hand. 

“Good choice.” 

Eve draws a shaky breath. With one word, she’s condemned a man to die-- someone she doesn’t even know, has never met. 

But she can’t find it within herself to retract what she said, not even as she studies his face, searching for some sign of _something_ within him, something she can’t even articulate that might somehow make her change her mind. In fact, the longer she looks, the more that dead-eyed stare ruins his innocuous face. 

“What is his name?” she asks, when Villanelle scrolls past the description too quickly for her to read it.

Villanelle scrolls back. BERTRAND CORETTI, reads the description. $30000 USD. 

“ _Coretti_ ,” says Eve bitterly. “He’s not even French, he’s _Italian_. An immigrant. Or someone in his family was.” 

Villanelle’s expression hardens. “The ‘right’ kind of immigrant.” 

Eve feels her mouth go dry. 

“I want to watch you kill him,.”

Villanelle’s mouth curls, her eyes bright and intense. “Of course.” 

Villanelle goes through another series of proxies, enters in another long chain of numbers, and within fifteen minutes five thousand dollars drops into her bank account. 

  
  


“Do you think anyone overheard us?” Eve asks, and Villanelle shrugs as they walk back to the hotel, watching Eve drain the dregs of an iced coffee. 

“It doesn’t matter if they did. While you were buying yourself another coffee, I bought us two tickets to Brussels, for afterwards.”

Eve shoots her an incredulous look. “Please tell me you left enough to pay for our hotel.”

“Of course I did.” 

Villanelle sounds defensive and Eve winces, realizing she had sounded like she was chastising a child. 

“You shouldn’t drink so much coffee,” Villanelle says, returning the favor. “I heard people can die from a heart attack. The caffeine is too much for them and-- _plop_ \--”

Villanelle pantomimes falling over and crosses her eyes, and Eve smiles. 

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” 

“Do you _want_ to go to Brussels?” 

“Brussels is fine.” 

Eve is more concerned with what happens _before_ Brussels, before they get to the _afterward_ Villanelle speaks of. 

“I don’t like Nice,” Villanelle says. 

It is an innocent thing to say, but it stops Eve in her tracks, as it registers what Villanelle is really saying: _I know_ you _don’t like it here_ , and _we don’t have to stay here_. It’s the kind of thoughtfulness not even Niko would have displayed, the kind of detail he never would have picked up on, not even Niko who so anxiously watched Eve’s every reaction and judgment.

“What? I thought you didn’t like it either.” 

“I don’t.” 

Eve gives her a sidelong glance, and Villanelle meets it with a defiant tilt of her chin, goading Eve to say it, begging Eve to acknowledge all the things they cannot say.


End file.
